Erzya

The Erzyas, eastern of the two Mordvinic peoples, speak Erzya, a Volgaic Uralic language, across the Sura and Moksha basins. A common Mordvinic speech is thought to have split into Erzya and Moksha around fifteen hundred years ago.

Early medieval Erzyas held off the Khazars and Polovtsians before Slavic colonists pressed them east toward Arzamas. In the thirteenth century Purgaz headed a kingdom allied with Volga Bulgaria, until Vladimir princes took his fortress of Obran Osh in 1221 and founded Nizhny Novgorod there. Unlike the Mokshas, who submitted to the Mongols in 1237, many Erzyas withdrew into the northern forests and kept up resistance.

After the mid-fourteenth century the Erzya lands passed to the Nizhny Novgorod-Suzdal principality and later Muscovy; some accepted baptism; others moved east, reaching the trans-Volga steppe and southern Urals by the seventeenth century. Those who remained became yasak-paying Mordvins.